


are our hearts cold (or are we cold-hearted)

by SideOrderOfGay



Series: Supercorptober 2020 [10]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F, Found Family, Implied Terminal Illness, Nuclear Winter AU, Supercorptober 2020 - Day 10: Ice, This One's Bittersweet Y'all
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-10
Updated: 2020-10-10
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:49:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26933896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SideOrderOfGay/pseuds/SideOrderOfGay
Summary: The world died years and years ago, when the bombs dropped and ushered in a new ice age. Raised in the City, the last vestige of civilization, Lena finds herself exiled to the eternal winter after she questions her brother one too many times. But the world she finds outside the city walls is wholly unlike the one she'd been lead to believe in, and all the truths she's accepted before are uprooted by one Kara Danvers and her family.
Relationships: Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor, background Clark Kent/Lois Lane, background alex danvers/kelly olsen
Series: Supercorptober 2020 [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1948081
Comments: 13
Kudos: 73





	are our hearts cold (or are we cold-hearted)

**Author's Note:**

> This one got away from me, y'all.  
> Additional warnings:  
> Discussion of possible rape/non-con, but no rape happens in the story.  
> An amputation happens, but it isn't described, we only see the aftermath.

Lena couldn’t feel her legs. It was an improvement over the searing pain she’d felt in the first two hours of fighting her way through the four feet of snow covering the plains. Back then, breaking though the frozen layer at the top and feeling the solid, sharp edges cut along her skin had felt like knives slashing at her with every step, but now there was nothing but numbness. She wasn’t sure how she was still walking, or even _why_. The chances that she’d make it were grim, and they became darker with every minute that passed, every moment closer to sundown.

Sundown was of course a relative term, she hadn’t seen the actual sun in years, always covered by an impenetrable layer of dark grey ash that the bombs had spewed into the sky. But it’s absence could still be felt, and without the light of the moon or the stars the nights had become black as tar, making it impossible to see the hand before your very eyes.

She’d come past several abandoned houses and smaller settlements, most of the buildings long since collapsed from the accumulated weight of the ash and snow on their roofs. There’d been no sign of people living, or even just passing by there. Maybe she should be glad about that. Lex had told her all manner of horror stories about the people outside the city walls: bandits, murderers, cannibals. All of them out for their their wealth, their lives, their house and home, and Lex was the only one who could protect her from the wastrels outside. He’d built an empire out of nothing, just to keep his little sister safe.

His concern for her safety only extended as far as she was willing to obey him, and the moment she’d stopped believing the lies that spilled from his lips whenever he opened his mouth he’d been more than happy to sentence her to exile. Death would probably be a more apt description of her punishment, but Lena could see why Lex wasn’t overly fond of it. It did sound a lot less civilised.

“This brings me no joy, Lena”, he’d announced to the tribunal, “but justice must be served.”

It sure didn’t seem that way when he’d gleefully recounted all the things the outsiders would do to her should they get their hands on her – he’d gloated that if she froze to death in the plains she should count herself lucky. Lena was inclined to agree.

She wasn’t sure whether it was the exhaustion that made the corners of her vision darken or if dusk was already approaching. There was a coppery taste in her mouth, she assumed she must have bitten her tongue with how bad her teeth were chattering. She was stumbling now more than she was walking, and she hoped it was only the dwindling daylight that made the tips of her fingers seem darker than the rest of her skin.

She fell.

Thrashed her way out of the snow.

Got up.

Took a step.

Knees buckled.

She fell again.

It dawned on her then that this was it. She tried to get her muscles to obey, but try as she might, they wouldn’t. All that was left for her to do was to curl into fetal position there in the snow, close her eyes, and wait.

At least she didn’t feel the pain anymore.

She didn’t know how much time had passed when she saw the light. It was flashing brightly behind her closed lids, and the scared 4-year-old catholic girl inside her she’d tried so hard to repress believed for just one second that it might be the light of heaven.

Then, through the sound of her chattering teeth, she heard voices approach.

“Kara, holy shit, there’s someone there!”

Rapid footsteps were approaching her now, her panicked mind sent into overdrive with visions of her brother’s hateful sneer as he raved about _rampant disease_ and _savages driven mad with hunger_ and _breeding stock._ It imbued her with a last burst of adrenaline-borne strength, as she crawled backwards, away from the light.

“Is she...is she dead?”

“No, she’s moving!”

Trying to get away was an exercise in futility. They’d quickly caught up with her, two figures looming over her, barely more than silhouettes as the flashlights they were holding were the only source of light. One of them took a step closer, knelt down beside her, and Lena squeezed her eyes shut again.

“Please”, she whispered in a voice barely louder than the rustling of fabric as the outsider pulled her into a sitting position, not in a terribly rough manner. What she was pleading for she couldn’t say, perhaps mercy, perhaps a swift death. Whether her pleas were heard she never found out, because as the outsider tried to help her to her feet with the help of the second figure, the world spun on its axis as she lost all sense of up or down, and she sunk into a deep, deep darkness.

She drifted in and out of something akin to consciousness. There were disjointed memories, she was unsure which ones were real and which ones her mind made up for her, pushed beyond its breaking point. She could remember someone lifting up her hand and holding a cold glass of water to her lips, tilting it ever so slightly as to only let a couple of drops wet her lips at a time, there were voices around her, footsteps, the smell of burning wood and acrid smoke.

The first time she truly woke up, she thought herself back in the city. It had always smelt of fire there, of the furnaces beneath the earth ever hungry for more sustenance.

“She’s resting, Kara, and you looking over my shoulder constantly won’t make it better. _Please_ , go outside. Go help Mike clear the path to the outhouse since you both completely skimped on ice duty after you found our guest.” The voice was female and somewhat gruff, she sounded like she was speaking through clenched teeth. She was also totally unbeknownst to her. Her pulse quickened as it fully occurred to her that she was in the hands of a group of outsiders. They hadn’t killed her yet, and from what she could feel her body had been deposited on a somewhat soft underground, maybe an old, stiff mattress. She was alive, she’d been kept alive, at the expense of precious resources, so they wanted _something_ from her.

“She was _dying_ , Alex!”

“ _Kara! Outside!_ ”

Hurried footsteps disappeared off somewhere, and Lena assumed the woman called Kara had left the one called Alex to her devices. Lena kept her eyes shut and breathed slowly, hoping to overhear more, maybe getting a solid idea of what these people wanted from her, finding out what she had to do in order to stay alive. But Alex remained silent at her side, until she heard the rustling of fabric and the touch of the woman’s hand on her forehead, startling her into foolishly letting out a gasp.

“Awake, huh?” Alex asked. There was no use in denying it. She opened her eyes and turned to face the person currently taking her temperature. She was a young woman with short cropped auburn hair, a stern crease between her eyebrows. As Lena let her gaze sweep across the room, she found herself in a large hall of some sort, some kind of factory, if she had to guess. The walls were tall and grey, the only light filtering in from tiny windows near the roof. There were several mattresses strewn across the floor, she could see about half a dozen from where she was lying but she supposed there were several more hiding behind the shoddily made privacy screens of wood and cardboard that intersected the room at regular intervals. The middle of the room gave way to a makeshift fire pit, probably the only source of warmth in the night.

“Do you want some water? We couldn’t get you to drink much while you were out.”

Lena nodded, gratefully, not quite trusting her voice not to tremble if she tried to speak, and she didn’t dare show any sign of fear or weakness, not when she didn’t yet know what the outsiders needed from her. She needed to grip the glass of water with both hands as to not let it slip from her weakened grasp. She noted that both of her hands were wrapped in bandages, but they worryingly, they were still somewhat numb. The liquid felt warm on her lips, probably not quite cooled down from boiling just yet.

“You were lucky Kara and Mike found you when they did. They were the last ones out for the night, and you definitely wouldn’t have made it until the morning. It was pretty stop and go as it is, my mom and me took turns watching over you.”

Lena nodded absently while forcing herself to drink in small sips as not to make herself sick, while her mind raced again. Alex had mentioned blood relatives, so this was a familial community, and they cared for their sick, even if they didn’t belong to them. They didn’t seem to be nomadic either, if the structures they’d erected were anything to go by. She allowed herself a sigh of relief. It could have been much, much worse. At least she didn’t have to expect to be used for their entertainment and be abandoned after the novelty had worn off. What duties awaited her in this commune she didn’t yet know, but she was certain wanton cruelty was not one of them. The sound of footsteps quickly approaching dragged her back to reality.

“Alex, the path to the outhouse is clear, Mike was almost done by the time I arrived, so I – _you’re awake_!”

It was Kara, the woman Alex had sent away previously. She was wrapped up in a thick coat that was covered in snow up to the waist, half of her face hidden behind a red woollen scarf that covered her mouth and nose, only her blue eyes and some strands of blonde hair that had come loose from the fur-lined hood were visible. When she set eyes on Lena, they seemed to widen in something Lena hesitated to call joy.

“How are you feeling?” she asked, almost bowling Alex aside in her eagerness to sit down next to her mattress.

“Right”, Alex said, “you keep an eye on our mystery guest, and I’ll fetch mom and let her get a look at her injuries too.”

She stood up and vanished behind one of the privacy screens, leaving Kara to plop down gracelessly into a cross-legged position at Lena’s side.

“I’m Kara”, she said, “I was the one who-”, here she paused, pulling a face, wrenching the scarf away from her face and turning away from Lena to spit something out.

“Sorry, got lint in my mouth”, she grinned sheepishly, her cheeks and the tip of her nose adorably pinkened by the cold.

“Anyway, Mike and me found you out in the snow.”

“I know, Alex told me”, Lena replied, and found her voice hoarse with disuse but otherwise steady.

“Oh, Alex is going to be so glad to see you awake too!”

That gave Lena pause. Alex didn’t seem hostile in any way, but she also wasn’t exactly jumping with joy to see her on her feet again.

“Why’s that?”, Lena asked. The suspicion must have been clear in her voice, as Kara lifted her hands in a placating gesture.

“Well, when we brought you in, we didn’t exactly have an unoccupied sleeping place lying around, so I left you mine, which meant I had to bunk with Alex like I used to when we were kids – she’s my sister – and...well, all I’m saying is that she’ll probably be glad to have some privacy with her girlfriend again.”

Lena couldn’t disguise the way her breath hitched at the word _girlfriend_. It seemed impossible to her, utopic even, to have a relationship built from love with another woman and have it be recognised by others. Lex had always been obsessed with progeny and the triumph of the human race. He hadn’t ostracized her for her attraction to women, yet he’d always been convinced that eventually, she’d move past what he called _selfish desires_ and marry a man for the sake of the greater good.

“So where do you come from?”, Kara asked. “We’ve had contact with a few nomad groups moving south, trying to find warmer climates, but since Brainy says it’s a futile effort because the ash clouds must cover at least the entire northern hemisphere we’re staying put where we are.”

Lena couldn’t tell her the truth. She knew the city’s walls were guarded, and up until now she’d been complacent in the shooting of the folks who came too close to the gates, too cold and hungry and desperate to heed the guard’s warnings. She knew that through years of keeping quiet and living in fear of her brother’s retaliation there was more blood on her hands than she could ever hope to wash off.

Kara must have caught her hesitation, because she backtracked at once.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. I’m only asking because if there are still friends of yours out there, we can probably put together a little search party.”

Lena shook her head. “No, there’s nobody out there. I’m alone.”

“Not anymore”, Kara said, reaching out to touch Lena’s shoulder affectionately, making her heart race. Lena would have laughed at herself if she wasn’t so stunned. Were she came from, affection had never been freely given, it was a reward for when she’d acted according to Lex’s designs, the carrot as opposed to the stick of forced labour down below, keeping the furnaces roaring. It was almost terrifying to be awarded it now, even though she’d done nothing to deserve it, in fact, the opposite was the case as she’d clearly refused to tell Kara the truth about where she’d come from. And yet, she couldn’t help but lean into the touch.

“I’m Lena”, she told her instead, offering at least some amount of information to appease her. The answering smile she received was brilliant.

Their moments was over when Alex returned, and older blonde woman she assumed to be her mother in tow. She introduced herself as Eliza, and asked Lena all manner of questions about her health, whether she was having difficulty breathing, and whether she was experiencing any localised numbness. When Lena told her about the numb feeling in her fingers, she frowned, but didn’t seem to distressed.

“Listen, Lena, I know this might be hard to hear, but when we found you, the frostbite in your fingers, especially in the pinky and ring finger of your right hand, had progressed very far. We didn’t want to risk necrosis, as we don’t have the proper equipment to fight a sepsis, should it come this far. I’m sorry we couldn’t involve you in the decision, but you were unconscious, and time was of the essence.”

Eliza spoke in a calm and patient manner, but it did nothing to lessen the impact of her next words:

“We had to take off the pinky and ring finger of your right hand.”

Her words were enough to turn Lena’s stomach, and she found herself senselessly clinging onto denial. “No”, she whispered, “no, that can’t be true, I would know…”

“Phantom sensations are a very common occurrence -”

Lena couldn’t hear her anymore, she’d started tearing at the bandages around her hands, despite Alex’ and Eliza’s protests because she needed to show them, needed to prove them wrong…

She retched on an empty stomach when she’d pulled enough layers aside to see it was true, two of her fingers were just _gone_ , two short stumps under the reddish brown stains on the bandage where they should be. She knew she was hyperventilating, distantly chastising herself to get a grip, but the nausea and panic made it impossible, her breath coming more and more shallow until -

She faintly realized someone was holding her. She was being cradled in strong arms, someone was holding her hair from her face, and as she tried to force her panicking senses to zero in on the touch she realised it was Kara’s voice murmuring into her ear, telling her to breathe slowly, in _one two three four_ , out _one two three four five_. Eventually the attack abated, and Lena sunk heavily into Kara’s arms, not even having enough strength left to feel humiliated at her display.

She didn’t pass out again, not physically, but her mind certainly checked out of reality for a time. When she became aware of herself again, the noise of people talking reached her ears.

“Brainy checked the fuses and I had a look at the cables, and there’s nothing wrong with them, so the problem has to be with the turbines, and we need to get them back online ASAP or the growbeds are going to pay the price.”

“I can do that”, Lena murmured before anyone had the chance to interject. She opened her eyes and realised with an embarrassed flush that Kara was still holding her. The blonde let her go when she started to squirm away.

“I can do that”, she repeated. Whoever had controlled the electricity in the City had controlled the power, quite literally, so she was raised to know her way around all kinds of sources of electricity. And it was high time to prove to the community that she was more than just a mouth to feed, that she could pull her weight, that she was worth the trouble they’d gone to to keep her alive.

“Are you sure?” Alex questioned with a raise of her eyebrows. “You just woke up today, you should rest some more.”

“I’m sure”, Lena said, projecting all of the certainty she didn’t feel into her voice. “I can do it.”

Nobody fought her on it, even though Kara looked like she was about to.

The issue, as it turned out, was once again the frost. Lena was told that the community had taken refuge in a hydroelectric power plant, one they’d actually gotten up and running again after the bombs had dropped. They had to regularly send people out to stop the formation of ice on the river that powered it in order to keep it operational, but since Kara and Mike hadn’t finished their duty last night it seemed some leftover water inside the turbine had frozen and expanded, wrenching key parts of the mechanism out of place. Nothing seemed to be past saving, thankfully, and Lena went to go about the tedious work of instructing Brainy, who they’d referred to in case of trouble with the turbines on how to fix them. To be perfectly honest, Lena had no doubt that Brainy would have proven just as capable to handle the problem as she was, but he didn’t complain. Lena was just glad to have found an area to prove her worth. As she watched Brainy work on the turbines, the exhaustion caught back up to her, and she had to sit down on the hard floor propped up against the concrete wall, just to take a little break, to close her eyes for just one second…

When she opened them again, she found herself back on the familiar mattress again, blue eyes staring down at her in concern.

“Lena! Don’t you dare scare me like that again, gosh, we all knew you weren’t ready but you seemed so sure!”

“Did it work? Are the turbines back online again?”

Kara just made an exasperated noise, like it was Lena who wasn’t making any sense at all.

“Yes, it worked”, she finally cried, gesturing around them. Lena now realized that the area was now illuminated by floodlights now. “But Lena, you passed out again!”

_So what_ , Lena thought, and noticed only at the scandalised gasp Kara let out that she’d said the words out loud.

“Okay, I think we need to put some ground rules down.”

Lena almost breathed a sigh of relief. This was territory she was familiar with. Maybe this community would start making more sense to her as soon as she knew whose authority to respect, which places were off limits and at which times she was expected to speak or hold her tongue.

“Rule number one: If you feel at all sick, or weak, or if you’re injured, you tell Alex and Eliza and you let someone else take over your chores for the day.”

This wasn’t at all what she’d expected, but she nodded anyway. Even more confusing was that, despite this rule being titled _rule number one_ no more rules seemed to follow, and Kara seemed placated with her response.

“Dinner will be ready soon”, Kara said, the abrupt change in topic almost making Lena choke on thin air. “Hope you like turnips!”

There were more, unspoken rules, but they were baffling all the same. Rule number two she found out about very quickly, when Kara asked her, blushing and stammering adorably, whether she’d be alright with sharing a mattress.

“You can say no if you want to, I can just stay with Alex, I’m sure she won’t mind...much.”

“It’s fine, Kara, it really is”, Lena said, despite an unexplainable surge of nerves. She’d never shared as much as a room before. It was the novelty of sharing a bed that made Lena’s heart beat out of her chest as they lay next to each other, stiff as boards. She didn’t dare entertain any other reason as to why her skin tingled with electricity in the places their skin touched.

Rule number two was that she was expected to speak her mind. Lena really wasn’t keen on finding out how far this rule extended, and what the exceptions were.

She lacked the common sense to know that rule number three was more of an in-joke among the outsiders as it was law. A young man named Winn, who was more or less the authority when it came to the growbeds where they grew turnips, potatoes and carrots, showed her around the greenhouses as soon as she was well enough to take on some duties.

“Welcome”, he said, swinging his arms like windmills in an excited gesture, “to my secret grow operation. Don’t narc.”

“Please laugh at his jokes”, a young brunette whom Lena remembered being called Nia stage-whispered. “He gets so mopey when they don’t land.”

Nia, as it turned out, was very easy to work with. She was the youngest in the group, and she’d also joined the community the most recently, and she was overjoyed to no longer be the newest member. She didn’t talk about the circumstances of her joining much, and Lena didn’t pry – it would be very hypocritical of her to expect the truth from others but hide her own. She soon became very fond of Nia, she easily made her feel welcome, and she had a way of intuiting whenever Lena needed a break but didn’t dare ask for it. She still was overcome with spells of nausea and dizziness, especially when she caught a glimpse of her mangled hand while working.

“I don’t actually remember much of it”, Nia blurted out one day as they were clearing the growbeds of weeds. It was astounding, really, how weeds seemed to thrive even in these conditions. “I was very young, and very sick. My family were moving south, like a lot of people did, and my sister dragged me here because my parents had heard there was a doctor living here. Eliza and Alex took me in, and helped me get better, and when they went to find my family again, they’d already up and left.”

There was a long pause in which they silently worked side by side.

“I don’t remember much, but I know that my parents wouldn’t have left me behind, not if they believed there was still hope.”

There’s an accusation in there somewhere, but Lena doesn’t comment on it. What would she have said anyway? _Siblings can be like that sometimes? My own brother abandoned me to die alone?_ She just reaches out to place a hand on Nia’s shoulder, like Kara did with her once, and she hopes her smile conveys more than she has the words to say.

The change in their sleeping arrangement happens gradually, so gradually that Lena doesn’t even notice until she finds herself one evening with her head resting literally on Kara’s chest, with Kara’s hands running idly to her hair. She forces herself to breathe calmly as soon as she notices, as if Kara was a very shy deer she ought not to disturb. Was this strange? Was it wrong? It couldn’t be. She felt more at peace than she’d been in a long time, and her sleep was more restful than it had ever been behind the walls of the City. She didn’t dare bring it up, for fear of calling attention to it meant Kara putting a stop to this unspoken ritual of theirs.

Not everyone in the community welcomed her with open arms. It really didn’t bother her all that much, she couldn’t imagine trusting a perfect stranger that had washed up in the middle of their tight-knit group either. There was Kara’s cousin Clark and his pregnant wife Lois, and while Lois was perfectly civil towards Lena, there was no disguising the look of distrust in Clark’s eyes whenever Lena so much as looked in his wife’s or Kara’s direction. Nor could James, whom Kara claimed to be an old family friend, hide the way his eyes followed Lena’s every move. But it was fine, it was to be expected. At least that’s what Lena told Kara, after she’d had a fight, a proper shouting match with the two about getting to know Lena for who she is and not who they expect her to be. At least whoever plans the chores has the common sense not to put them in the same group.

Lena really doesn’t mind the judgement, but what she does mind is Mike’s constant advances on her. “He gets...excited when there’s someone new in the group”, Alex explains with a frown, as if there’d been similar problems with him before. Lena isn’t quite sure whether she should reject him. Sure, the thought of being with him made her stomach turn, but Lena wasn’t sure whether she could let the chance to establish a proper foothold in the community. She needed the security, just because she was liked by Kara and Nia, and tolerated by Alex and Eliza, didn’t mean that she’d be safe should it come to infighting. So she endured his flirting, and smiled politely to cover up the urge to cringe whenever he would touch her arm in a manner that was to frequent to be truly accidental.

Kara, of course, read her like a book.

“I’ll beat him up for you if you want to”, she’d said, the determination in her voice bordering on scary. “I mean it.”

Lena didn’t doubt that for a single second. She smiled patiently.

“I don’t mind his attention”, she lied effortlessly, “I think I might come to like him some day.”

“But that’s not what love is supposed to be about!” Kara cried. Love – what a cute concept. It was all very Kara.

“It’s not about love”, Lena tried to explain. “I want to stay here.”

“Then stay!”

As if it was that easy.

“You shouldn’t have to force yourself to like him”, Kara said. “You can just tell him to back off.”

“Oh, I’m sure he’d _love_ that.”

“That doesn’t matter! It’s your choice, and if he doesn’t like it, that’s his problem. If he makes trouble, I’ll beat him up, as I promised.”

“Kara-”

“No, Lena. Your right to stay here doesn’t depend on who you date. And if anyone tells you anything different, they can have a word with me.” Kara squared her shoulders demonstratively, and Lena had to swallow. She’d never really noticed how muscular her friend was, but now that she knew, it was difficult to take her eyes off her straining biceps.

“I’ll always protect you”, Kara whispered, and Lena was glad the blonde took this exact moment to take her into her arms, because it meant Kara couldn’t see the way Lena had to dig her teeth into her lower lip to stop it from shaking.

Mike didn’t take it well. He pouted and made passive-aggressive remarks, he threw her nasty looks over his turnip stew and demanded to no longer be assigned chores alongside Lena, which Lena was rather fine by her. He got over it eventually. He had nowhere else to go, and in a community that had no choice but to rely on each other there was no place for long-held grudges. They got along because they had to. He actually managed an apology for his behaviour some weeks later, hands buried in the pockets of his worn jeans and eyes stubbornly averted. Lena took it, because it was the best she was going to get from him, and she couldn’t afford to have an axe to grind.

Rule number four was basically common sense: You don’t go onto the ice alone. Ice breaking duty was always assigned in pairs, to have someone to call for aid should something happen. It was a necessity Lena soon became all to aware of when she shared ice breaking duty with J’onn, one of the eldest members besides maybe Eliza. She’d been there when she saw him lean heavily on his icepick, and, moments later, collapse into a heap out on the ice, his breath coming shallow, moaning in pain. She’d called for Alex and Eliza while dragging him inside to safety. The other’s soon helped carry him to his assigned bunk, where Eliza immediately started tending to him.

“Is he sick?”, she asked Alex, but before she could answer J’onn emitted a sound Lena first thought to be a dry cough, but soon she understood that he was laughing, a pained, horrible laugh devoid of mirth.

“Four atomic bombs dropped over North America, and she asks me if I’m sick”, he coughed. “We’re all dying of something out here.”

The words shouldn’t surprise her, but they hit her like a ton of bricks as the words echoed in her mind, and they continued to do so whenever she saw Kara struggling for breath after completely mundane activities, when she saw how tired Winn always looked no matter how much sleep they got, when she saw how little weight Lois was gaining despite being pregnant.

They sent out hunting parties too, sometimes. They seldom brought home more than a meagre rat or a squirrel if they were lucky, but they went out anyway. Lena suspected it was more to avoid cabin fever than to find a sustainable source of food. She’d come to look forward to these moments, as Kara always volunteered to be her partner. She’d come to adore the quiet out there, no matter the cold, and she’d become addicted to the way Kara’s hand found hers almost automatically whenever they walked next to each other.

On a day like this, clearer than most she’d seen, she noticed it: On the horizon in the distance, one large column of acrid black smoke was rising into the clouds above.

“The City”, Kara explained, and Lena closed her eyes at the assault of memories, the empty-eyed workers shuffling down to the furnaces under threat of exile, the air that hurt to breathe and the sneer of her brother.

“It seems so close”, Kara remarked.

“Don’t worry, they don’t leave their walls”, Lena said quickly in an effort to calm her friend, then quickly tacked on: “So I’ve heard.” She cringed at how bad she’d gotten at lying ever since she didn’t really need to do it on a daily basis.

Kara regarded her with an unreadable expression for a long time. Then:

“We all know, you know? That you’re Lena Luthor.”

Lena stared at her, wide-eyed. “But how...why”, she stuttered, suddenly forgetting how to form complete sentences.

“Most of us are exiles ourselves. It’s why Clark and James have such a hard time trusting you, because they were suffering and they can’t see you were suffering under Lex as well.”

Lena stood there, dumbfounded. Whenever she thought she’d found a system of rules to operate by, Kara came along to uproot her view of the world.

“How can you even look at me, after all my family has done to your family?”, she whispered.

“Because I know you”, Kara stated, as certain as one could be about anything. “And I’m glad you’re here.”

“I’m glad I’m here, too”, Lena murmured, resting her head on Kara’s shoulder, and Kara’s answering smile was so bright she almost didn’t notice the sunshine that had landed upon Kara’s features. When she did, she couldn’t help the soft gasp that escaped her.

“Kara, look!”, she squealed with abandon, pointing towards the crack in the clouds that let a singular ray of sun escape to dapple the frozen ground with light. They stood there, shadowing their eyes with their hands and staring directly into the sun like a pair of idiots, huddled closely together.

“Maybe this will be the last long winter we have to see”, Kara said, her eyes teary, not only from the brightness of the sun.

“Yeah, maybe”, Lena answered, closed her eyes, and _hoped_.

**Author's Note:**

> fuck Nia's sister all my homies hate Nia's sister.
> 
> How did they grow food in a nuclear winter? Don't ask me lol I had one day to write and research this.
> 
> Title taken from the Stupendium's rap about Frostpunk cause I'm a nerd and the hook slaps don't @ me


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